309 11 Rethinking the Mandara Political Landscape: Cultural Developments, Climate, and an Entry into History in the Second Millennium A.D. Scott MacEachern INTRODUCTION In Western historiography, the middle of the second millennium a.d. has usually been considered a period of transition in coastal West Africa, the time of the first encounter between Europeans and the dif- ferent peoples of the region, when this part of Africa entered fully into history and an engagement with the outside world (Stahl 2001:19– 25). It is no coincidence that there is also an important transition in West Africanist archaeology during this period as well, marked by a decreasing intensity of research on later communities: history progressively replaces archaeology as the privileged mode for inves- tigating human experience through the last 500 years. In addition, the focus of archaeological research undertaken shifted through this period, from the analysis of indigenous cultural processes before about a.d. 1500 to a concern with the archaeology of culture contact, sites implicated in the slave trade, and European colonization – to a certain degree, that is, with the archaeology of Europeans in West Africa – afterward (MacEachern 2005). The situation in more northerly areas of the subcontinent is some- what different, in part because of the greater time depth of written sources for the regions to the south of the Sahara (Levtzion and Hopkins 1981; Lewicki 1974) and in part because of the greater dis- tance between this area and the disruptions associated with European contact along the coast. These circumstances have combined to ren- der the historiographical transition in that region less abrupt and have in turn had distinct effects upon historical (and archaeological) Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 128.114.27.41 on Tue May 01 20:18:57 BST 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511921032.016 Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2012